Bringing “High Tension” to America: In order to avoid being relegated to smaller theaters and limiting its audience, “High Tension” writer/director Alexandre Aja and Lions Gate Films had to make changes to get the MPAA to change their rating from NC-17 to R. In addition, Aja and Lions Gate had to figure out how to make the movie, which was in French, appeal to horror fans in America who aren’t used to watching films of that genre with subtitles.
Aja said, “In fact, we did the movie in France and it was in French, and it was rated over 16 in France. And then when Lions Gate picked up the movie in Toronto to release in the US, they were facing a situation where on the one hand, they could release the movie with subtitles in NC-17. That means a very, very small platform of theaters. And because of the subtitles, only some art house theaters, which wasn’t a good place to show the movie because I think the heart of the audience is not in this kind of theaters.
On the other hand, the other solution was to dub the movie and dubbing would take a lot out of what I think makes ‘High Tension,’ ‘High Tension.’ The movie was kind of stupid because the action takes place in France and you can imagine French cops or French gas station guy talking with an American accent. It would be like a comedy. So we were wondering, ‘What can we do?’ And people from Lions Gate came to us with a very, very good idea which was, ‘Why are we not making a kind of hybrid dub?’ The action is still taking place in France. The lead actress is French but she’s going to spend the weekend with her best friend who is an American girl with an American family on a French farm. It’s still logical and it looks like it was made to be like that. Some of the film is dubbed and the other parts are subtitled, but at the end of the day, the movie is only like eight or nine minutes of dialogue so I think it works very well.
About cutting the film, I was very skeptical because we had a very bad experience with Korea because Korea released the movie with huge cuts. It’s cruddy. And when they said, ‘You know, we would like to come back to the MPAA and ask them to reconsider the NC-17 for the R. Make some little cuts.’ Little cuts like the blow job scene at the beginning with the severed head. And finally they managed to convince the MPAA to rate it R instead of NC-17 with only cutting like 30 seconds of the movie, without cutting any scenes. Without cutting anything very important. You watch the movie and you watch the movie uncut, and it’s 99% the same movie. It’s working, I guess, I think very, very well. So it was a great surprise. I’m now very, very happy and proud of this version - our version, and also with the hybrid dub.”
Paying Homage to ‘70s Slasher Films and Alexandre Aja’s Attraction to Horror Films of that Time Period: “With my best friend and partner, Gregory Levasseur, who wrote the movie with me and did the movie with me, we grew up watching these films. We grew up watching all the movies by Wes Craven, by John Carpenter, and we loved so much those movies from the ‘70s and the beginning of the ‘80s because they were so real in a way. I mean, you know I’m 26 and during the ‘90s all the horror movies that you could see during the ‘90s were so kind of ‘joke’ movies. Joke movies that weren’t very serious, weren’t very real. What we tried to do when we started writing ‘High Tension’ was to relive again this very specific spirit of the ‘70s, a very nasty, savage spirit.”
The Use of Real Effects Rather Than CGI in “High Tension:” “In fact we used just a few CGI things. We didn’t need a lot of CGI because we were working with a great, great, great makeup artist – Giannetto De Rossi - who did a Lucio Fulci and a Dario Argento movie. He’s a big, big, big guy. And CG was just here to make the gags more real. Because the idea was to make this movie as real as possible.”
PAGE 2: Alexandre Aja on Horror Remakes and "The Hills Have Eyes"
